


The Goddesses of Broken Causes (One Honest Relationship)

by trace_of_scarlet



Category: Captain America (2011), Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, slashy if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-05
Updated: 2011-10-05
Packaged: 2017-10-24 08:21:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/261178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trace_of_scarlet/pseuds/trace_of_scarlet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Minerva McGonagall and Peggy Carter find their own ways of navigating their wars.</p><p>"The first witch Peggy Carter ever meets is standing straight-backed and cheek-scratched in a French forest, primly re-plaiting her long black hair."</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Goddesses of Broken Causes (One Honest Relationship)

**Author's Note:**

> Beta-ed by my friend Eric, who is love. <3
> 
> Set while Peggy and Cap are in France, mid-movie; completely ignores Pottermore’s information on Minerva’s backstory, because I thought it was rubbish.

The first witch Peggy Carter ever meets is standing straight-backed and cheek-scratched in a French forest, primly re-plaiting her long black hair. Peggy knows she is a witch because suddenly button-black eyes stare straight at her even though she, Peggy, is behind a tree and knows damn well that she hasn’t made a sound.

The witch says, “Hello.”

The witch says her name is Minerva McGonagall and smiles politely when Peggy, grateful for a familiar small ceremony, reaches forward to shake the proffered white hand. She is tall and almost gawkily slim and perhaps twenty years old – certainly no older than twenty-three – and tells Peggy that she is in France to rescue a boy she knows. The way she says it and the way she doesn’t say other things permits Peggy to assume that the boy is her lover, but Peggy knows with the perfect certainty of one professional to another that Minerva McGonagall is a spy.

She is not afraid; that much, Peggy later remembers clearly, although it does occur to her that the witch is not one to cross.

“What can you do?” she asks, stupidly; and Minerva smiles.

“Oh, a great many things,” she says, with all the dryness of Peggy’s favourite brand of gin. “But I cannot raise the dead, or I wouldn’t be here.”

There is something dark in her eyes then which Peggy has seen in a great many faces of late, and after making such a clear _faux pas_ by asking, she feels that the least she can do is to invite her new ... acquaintance ... to take tea with her.

The witch looks at her for a long, long moment before she says ‘yes’.

Peggy, momentarily stymied by the question of how to escort her new find to base camp, finds the answer provided to her – and herself struck dumb for the first time in her life – when a look of concentration flicks across Minerva McGonagall’s stern, good-looking face for an instant and with a _pop_ she turns herself into a rangy grey tabby cat.

The cat gives her a look that clearly says ‘Well?’ and Peggy has to smile. “Well, I suppose that solves _one_ difficulty,” she says, mostly to herself, and turns for camp. “This way, if you please.”

Peggy’s witch turns back into a woman once they are safely ensconced in her own private tent (“Found yourself a pussycat, have you Carter?” called the colonel; Peggy smiled and kept walking), neatly adjusting her little black beret so that it sits at the required _chic_ angle. The hat is an affectation, an oddity; Minerva McGonagall, Peggy suspects, generally has very little use for affectations. Despite it, she is as Scottish as her surname, and perhaps it is this – combined with the persistently haunting sensation that she has stepped into a storybook – that has led Peggy to commit this folly, to bring a woman who she is quite certain is a spy for powers unknown into a tent in the very centre of Allied operations in Europe.

Her witch, her spy – already, she has begun to think of Minerva McGonagall as ‘hers’ – whoever she is, she sits in a corner of Peggy’s tent curled in on herself like a wild creature at bay, like a cat absorbing every possible molecule of unaccustomed comfort from her surroundings without relinquishing one single iota of independence or of wildness. She removes neither her coat nor that ridiculous little black beret, and watches Peggy busy herself with her stubborn little gas camping stove with a certain odd curiosity that only increases as Peggy repeatedly fails to light it. When she fails for the seventh time, however, Minerva leans forward and extracts a strange slim stick from her sleeve as Peggy curses in three languages.

“Allow me,” she says graciously, and taps the stove briskly with her stick. “ _Incendio!_ ”

The stove bursts into obedient flame, making Peggy swear again as her witch puts the wand back away with just a hint of smugness. Tea is poured a few minutes later and Minerva sits back gratefully with it, her chipped cup folded neatly between her hands as she sips scalding, strong sweet tea without once taking her piercing black eyes from Peggy’s face. Peggy herself is still half-wondering why she brought Minerva back to camp with her (careless talk costs lives. What may a careless agent cost?), and she strongly suspects that the witch is thinking much the same thing.

“So.” The witch speaks, but the silence has stretched between them like old elastic for so long that for a second Peggy can’t place the voice or where it comes from. “This war you and the Muggles are fighting. Are you winning?”

“Muggles?” Peggy asks, playing for time even though she has little trouble in guessing what the strange term means.

“It’s our term for non-Wizarding folk,” Minerva explains briskly, with a direct look that says she knows exactly what Peggy is doing. “Or anything non-magical, really. Muggle technology, muggle homes, muggle radio, etcetera.”

Peggy nods, fascinated by the glimpse into an alien culture this affords her. “You should be a teacher,” she murmurs, and Minerva quirks the briefest of smiles.

“I did consider it. But I’m really quite busy, just at present.”

“With your own war?” Peggy guesses – except it isn’t quite a guess; Minerva wears her soldiering like a cape – and after a moment is rewarded with a very measured and firm nod from her companion.

“Yes.” Minerva raises her head, and gives Peggy the directest look out of a great many very direct looks she has favoured her with thus far. “Are you winning yours?”

“Are you winning _yours_?” Peggy counters, and oddly enough Minerva nearly smiles again, as if at a chess piece neatly falling into place.

Pertly, “I believe _I_ asked first.”

Peggy almost snickers, disguising it in tucking away a stray curl. “Well. I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours?”

This time, Minerva _does_ chuckle, if only briefly. “Very well. But you first.”

“I expected nothing less,” Peggy says sweetly, but her eyes grown more serious as she meets the witch’s gaze over their battered teacups. She sips and sips again, and doesn’t notice her scalded top lip as she tries to decide how to reply.

“No,” she finally answers. “We are not winning this war... Not yet.”

Minerva cocks an eyebrow. “But you think you can be?”

“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t,” Peggy assures her steadily, and the women’s eyes meet in silent acknowledgement of the lie. Peggy would be camped out in this dank, draughty little French forest even if she believed the Allies’ situation to be hopeless, because someone has to be and some things have to be done. “But yes, I do believe we can win. Not soon, perhaps, but eventually.”

“And you’ll be here until you do?”

Peggy nods. “As you say.”

She sips her tea again, this time wincing slightly at the rasping of her burned upper lip. “As for you?” she asks, her head a little quirked. “We did have a deal...”

“Indeed.” For the first time since meeting Peggy, Minerva speaks without meeting her eyes. Instead, she watches the gentle ripples of her red-brown tea for several long, slow moments before she speaks. “I suppose... No, I don’t suppose we _are_ winning our war. But we are not losing it, either.”

Peggy leans forward, intrigued. “What is happening?” she demands. “How will you win it?”

Minerva’s eyelashes flicker. “The same deal as before?”

“Of course.”

“Well, then.” The witch flicks out her skirts primly, and Peggy can’t help but notice that despite the rain of the forest and the mud her – yes, her robes – are immaculate and pristine and hint discreetly of tartan like the black rosettes in a panther’s black fur. Nevertheless, they are rearranged with what in any other woman would be indecision before Minerva speaks again.

“There is ... a man,” she says eventually with a faint hint of pride mingled with feminist distaste, improbably reminding Peggy of a cook carefully weighing each word before she adds it to the mix. “I think that he could change everything – I look at him and I see all the – the _potential_ to change the world, but he hasn’t. Or won’t. Not yet. But I believe that if he fought as he could, he could change this. Change _everything_.”

“Just one man?” Peggy asks her, half-startled: the parallels are so strange and so raw. _Steve..._

Minerva nods. “Just one man. Suitably aided, of course.”

“By you?”

“If he asks it. If I can be of use,” the witch says, but Peggy’s sharp ears hear ‘forever. Whenever he needs me’ like an echo of an echo.

Minerva, serene now, delicately resettles her cup in her fingers, just so, before she says “And for our bargain?”

“What? Oh.” This time it is Peggy’s turn to still and to think. “I used to think that wars were big and simple,” she says thoughtfully, when she speaks. “When I was a child, I mean. Then, at university, I learnt that they were vast and impossibly complex, and now... Now I see that there’s hardly a war at all, only a mass of tiny, snarling, sad little battles. Now...” She studies her tea without seeing it. “There’s a man,” she says. “And, yes, I think he has the power to change everything. If one man _can_ win the war for us, it will be him.”

“ _Men_ ,” they both sigh, then have to hastily duck to hide the indignity of their shared smiles as they catch each other’s eyes.

Minerva leans forwards, curious as a cat. “So, all these _Americans_ you live with. How in Merlin’s name are you coping?”

“Well, my tea is safe, at any rate,” Peggy says, and has to laugh.

From then on they are friends, and they stay that way ‘for the duration’ – as the Churchill-snarling posters put it – and onwards. Minerva appears from nowhere to a ragged firefight outside Nouvion, saving Peggy’s life from a bullet with a swipe of her wand. The pair of them sit out a London air raid in a tiny Muggle pub in Clapham, drinking gin-and-tonics and shaking with the fear and the effort of not being afraid. Minerva is the first person Peggy can bring herself to tell about Steve’s disappearance, and some twenty-five years later Peggy is the only person Minerva tells about the murder of her own lost lover – even though she never tells her his name – with a raw wild honesty that very nearly frightens her. All in all, theirs is virtually the only relationship Peggy belongs to which manages to survive the war, and Peggy never quite decides whether she likes that or not.


End file.
